The invention relates to apparatus for prompting patients to take medication at prescribed times, and more particularly, to such apparatus and methods which are automatically programmable by a pharmacist.
A variety of machines and devices have been proposed for recording intervals at which patients, especially those under care of an attendant, take medication at periodic intervals prescribed by a physician. If the patient or caretaker ignores the proper instructions and repeats the dosage too frequently or fails to administer or take medication at the proper time, the concentration of medication in the patient's body may become too high or too low. In order to ensure that medications are taken at the proper time, a varietv of devices, such as the one disclosed in U.S. Pat. No, 4,361,408, have been devised to generate audible and/or visual prompting or alarm signals that remind a patient or his caretaker to administer the correct dosage at the correct time. All of these devices have been too complex and costly, inconvenient to program, and have not been flexible enough in establishing varying time intervals at which the medication need to be administered. It would be desirable to have a prompting device which is easily automatically programmable by the pharmacist at the time that the prescription is purchased, thereby overcoming the potential problems that would be associated with a failure to correctly set the time interval or intervals for taking a particular medication.
Accordingly, one object of the invention is to provide a pharmacist-programmable portable medication prompter device that is simple in structure, low in cost, and has the capability of allowing various different prompting intervals to be programmed into it.
In recent years, regulations requiring medication containers to have child-proof caps have been enacted. For some patients, it would be desirable if certain medications were available to them only at the prescribed time in order to prevent such patients from carelessly taking excessive doses of medications such as tranquilizers.
Accordingly, another object of the invention is to provide a pharmacist-programmable prompting device which is incorporated in a locking cap of a medication container and only allows the cap to be removed at physician-prescribed intervals.
There are instances in which it would be desirable for a pharmacist and/or physician to have instant access to a medical history of a particular patient in order to know if a particular prescription should not be administered to that patient or if the times of administering a particular prescription should be synchronized in a particular way with other medications that the patient is receiving.
Accordingly, it is an object of the invention to provide a pharmacist-programmable medical prompting device that stores and makes available medical history information for a particular patient.
Another problem with some prior medication prompter "alarm-clock-like" devices is that they need to be manually reset by the patient or medication administrator each time a medication is dispensed. Failure to reset the device can cause undue drain on the self-contained batteries of the device.
Accordingly, another object of the invention is to provide a pharmacist-programmable medication prompter that does not need to be manually reset each time medication is administered.
Although medication prompting devices have been ehclosed in caps of individual medication containers in the past, as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,367,995, and other devices have been disclosed for monitoring compliance with prescription administering instructions by sensing when a medication cap is removed or when a liquid containing container is inverted, as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,034,757, these concepts have not yet been incorporated in a practical, low cost, pharmacist-programmable medication prompting device, and no prior art device has yet found extensive utilization in the industry.
It is another object of the invention to provide a low cost, practical pharmacist-programmable medication prompting device that maintains a record of the number of times the cap of the medication container has been removed and/or the record of the times at which the cap of the medication container has been removed.